Messages - Fieldmouse

Carter never used serial organization and Messiaen only occassionally.

My main beef with serialism is that for all its rigorous derivations, much of it is lost in surface chaos to most ears and many of the post-tonal masterworks succeed in spite of this organizational method.

The destruction of sonata-from orthodoxy causes a new and no less rigorous orthodoxy of openness, or non-rules-ness. This the paradox that 12 tone music participates in. But we do it violence if we ascribe agency to it, i.e. if we think that it (or the composers who represent it) had some kind of radical free will to choose to affirm this type of music in abstraction from history. (This is, of course, the perennial issue of judgement; of the relation between subject and object, individual and society/history/nature)

The ahistorical evaluation, and its tendency to determine whether an artistic school is 'good' or 'bad', borders on being worthless. It is violent toward the wrong component of society, like blaming teachers for the state of the education system.

Interesting and in some ways similar problems are covered in Advaita Vedanta, a philosophical school of Hinduism, and also in the Buddhist anatta debate (i.e. whether the buddha taught 'the doctrine of anatta' (lit. no-soul, no-self, no-ego), or if he was doing the old trick of defining the ineffable negatively, by describing a whole lof of components of personality and then declaring them anatta. Is the soul non-existent or is it merely extant in another order of knowing?)

The debate is interesting as more than a battle of modern perversions of doctrine. Within the buddhist doctrine, which other than this controversy can be quite straightforward and intuitively agreeable, this presents an interesting philosophical problem: is there a soul, and is it at all related to the identity we currently experience, or is it something beyond cognition? We can equally ask what is Nirvana? or what exists outside of the knowing subject?

Stranger, insofar as you are refering to the commonly held concept of 'self' as something that passes into nothingness, I don't think we have a disagreement of any substance. But I think that the only way we can stop there is by closing off our brains to an area of thought because it gets tricky. It's also where things get interesting and stimulating.

I don't think that its a waste of time to think about this stuff at all. Actually, if death is the particular end that you speculate that it is, and I'm sympathetic to that view insofar as we limit our consideration to the common view of 'self', then does that not make everything a waste of time? Or does it mean that we should all embrace hedonism/nihilism/fatalism for our brief existence?

[I did hesitate about resurrecting this thread, but I've been thinking about this issue a lot recently, and if possible I'd be interested in a discussion as opposed to a debate. That is to say, my attitude has changed.]

The weird thing is that Art thinks that the intellect comes from the mother and the will from the father. How does the intellect come from the mother if females lack the capacity to think?

Reading his aphorisms and essays (the penguin edition) I skipped the on women section so I wouldn't spoil my estimation of him.

The religion dialogue is great because it is inconclusive. On the indestructibility of being is great (although he is totally ripping off hinduism), also On the antithesis of the thing-in-itself and its appearance. On the vanity of existence is hilarious.

anything. if you only listen to one thing, then that one thing is commonplace to you by definition.

as a personal opinion, it's like i've heard people say about certain women, like the super-"hot" models and whatnot: "For every amazing-looking girl, there's a guy that's tired of fucking her."

recognizing something as brilliant doesn't necessarily mean you have to listen to it every day. otherwise it gets burnt-out for you, or... commonplace. but i'm all for raising expectations/standards to the level of <insert favorite composition here>, that's how we advance.

I agree: we've touched on a nice dialectic here. We aim to have standards, but recognise that we can't be peaking with out listening/reading or whatever all the time.

I think Beethoven's 9th is a great example of this. It is a piece of music that I've listened to properly about twice. It makes a huge demand on you and it is exhausting as well as rewarding. To do this daily would be pointless. It's not necesarily that the piece itself would become mundane, but that the listener would not be able to give what is required to receive its nourishment.

Me too. Then I go over to www.abebooks.com(.au) and get a lovely hardcover edition secondhand for less than the price of a new mass market paperback (that is, if I can't find it in a local secondhand store). Then I turn off my darn computer and turn on a lamp and read. (How sentimental I am!)